Tomislav Vašíček

“In 1938 came the Victorious February. On March 15th, I think it was, Dad came home all ruined and serious. He said they took our shop. I asked him as a little boy: Who? Thieves? I know it overwhelmed Dad very much. He was lying on the couch in the living room, and there was no talk to him. He was lucky that one of his relatives was a builder. He gave him a course of engineering at an industrial school, so he got a job at Stavoprojekt in Letná, where he worked in the calculation department until 1958. That year came the reorganization. As was customary, suspicious people, that is the members of the bourgeois class, suspected that the economy was not doing as well as promised and they had to go move on the manual labour. My dad went to work from Prague to Karlovy Vary, where he worked with a shovel on the road. Later he would even go to Ostrava, doing something there.”

“When we made lyrics to be able to sing them publicly, they had to be allowed. So we put the lyrics for review, but we played them at a time when it wasn't decided. Now the decision has come. There was a text that was completely banned. But then there was another permitted, only one verse was struck out. People from the Chief Press Supervision sat under the podium and watched if we were singing what they were forbidden. We sang and the audience enjoyed it, because where it was forbidden, we sang la la la. The audience knew what was originally there, so what the Main Press Supervisor did not want.”